Category Archives: miscellaneous
Priest Dogs of Iran
This is a continuation of a thread on dogs. Zoroastrian funerary rituals appear to indicate that ancient Iranians believed that dogs had a unique power to discern whether the life had departed from a body. What follows next is known as the dog-sight (sagdid) ceremony. A dog, generally a “four-eyed” dog (a dog with two [...]
Kissing the Killer
Throughout the lowlands singers sing of your deep, feminine soul; How reclining, you roll down your bed amidst your veils and embankments; They marvel at your fluent, accommodating ways, how you slip through the world, flowing around every obstacle, rounding every edge, and polishing every turn. You compel us, it is true, down to where [...]
River at the Edge of the World
It may presently be one of the most God-forsaken places on our planet. The Kokcha River region of Afghanistan is good for little more than opium farming and arms smuggling today, though it was once one of the great corridors between the ancient worlds of India and Iran, long before Darius and the Persian Empire. [...]
The Cradle of Ethical Metaphysics
If we turn to the Gathas to determine the geographic origins of Zoroastrianism, it seems reasonable to conclude—or guess—that Zoroastrianism originated somewhere in or around Bactria-Margiana. Recent discoveries of what appear to be ancient, pre-Zoroastrian fire temples in the Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex (BMAC), appear to confirm this line of reasoning. But we cannot necessarily conclude [...]
The Original Holy Land
What place do most of us think of when we hear the term “Holy Land”? Perhaps we ought to think of Afghanistan. Let us begin by looking at that highly influential proto-western religion of the Persian Empire, Zoroastrianism. Though it is evident that Judaism originated in Mesopotamia and developed in and around Palestine, it is [...]
Watching Whales in the Sink
Much of my childhood was spent in the towns of Hanford and Tulare, in a region once called the Tulare Basin, not far from the dry bed of Tulare Lake. This name “Tulare Basin” might have had more meaning before Tulare Lake was drained for wheat and cotton, but it’s still got that “basin” feel [...]
What is California?
An enumeration of the elements of California might proceed as follows: The San Andreas Fault The California Current The Sierra Nevada The Central Valley Redwood Forests The San Andreas Fault The Pacific and North American Plates, two of the world’s largest, collide from the Gulf of California to Shelter Cove, just south of Cape Mendocino, [...]
Girl in a Tree
I leaned against the steel wall of the bus, my chin propped up against the the cool window frame; my cheek and ear against the glass. Beyond the glass, what met the eyes was more fleeting; less real. The desert passed. Trailer parks passed. Markets passed. A more familiar wall of trees appeared, and the [...]
Hello Goodbye
The page cracked with brutal life. The surface of the earth shook as though under the marching feet of a giant, as missiles screamed out of the sky and pounded the cities, dams, and military bases. A cobweb of contrails covered the page. Anti-ballistic missiles would occasionally meet the aggressors up in the paper sky, [...]
The Twilight of the Gods
Under a low umbrella of stars, he had stealthily walked with only his walking stick, up the Grand Canal, a linear, u-shaped glacial canyon that slices through the mountains as though a great, dull axe had hewn the range from North to South. This was before forests had moved down the cliffs and into the [...]